Heart of the City: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York by Ariel Sabar '93 (Da Capo).

Courtesy Stephanie Sabar

Yona and Stephanie Sabar met in Washington Square Park a few weeks before this 1966 snapshot was taken.

Ariel
Sabar's father, Yona, was born in a mud hut in Kurdish Iraq, the son of
Jewish peasants who later immigrated to Israel, where their lives were
marked by struggle and hardship. Yona eventually made his way to the
United States, where he married Ariel's mother, Stephanie Kruger '60,
who had grown up in Greenwich Village the daughter of a CEO "and his
elegant wife, the sort of people who held season tickets to the
Metropolitan Opera."

Ariel told the story of how Yona and Stephanie met in Washington Square
Park and were married four months later at some length in his
award-winning 2008 book, My Father's Paradise, and he revisits it in his new book, Heart of the City,
his account of nine couples who met and fell in love unexpectedly in
some of New York City's great public spaces. The story of his parents'
meeting and courtship, Sabar writes in the introduction to the new
book, "showed how immigrants here could leap borders of culture and
class in ways unthinkable back home. It showed how in a society as
fluid as America's, any two people could fall in love, anywhere."

By why? Even in the United States there had to have been something
extraordinary about the circumstances that allowed two people from such
disparate socioeconomic backgrounds as Yona and Stephanie to even talk
to each other, let alone let their guard down and connect emotionally.

"There's all this mythology of how love in New York works," Sabar says, citing Sex and the City, An Affair to Remember, Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally, and most of Woody Allen's films as examples. Even King Kong, Sabar points out with a laugh, is a story of "unrequited love set at a major New York landmark."

But what about real life? "Could a vibrant public space, in some subtle but essential way, play matchmaker?" he asks in Heart of the City.
Combining a journalist's devotion to research and attention to facts
with a novelist's flair for setting, character, and dialogue, Sabar
shows nine reasons why he believes the answer is yes. The nine
different love stories he describes span five decades of New York City
history. The couples meet in such landmarks as Central Park, Grand
Central Station, the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Times Square, and Washington Square Park,
as well as on the city's sidewalks and subway. In each case, the magic
of the place itself is vital to the couple's connection.

Chesa, for example, arrived from the Philippines at midnight,
disoriented and alone, with little more than a friend's address and
phone number in her pocket. She had never been to the United States
before. She asked a stranger how to get to Chinatown, and when she
later spotted him on the A train, they struck up a conversation. Matt
and Sofia, meanwhile, literally bumped into each other in midtown when
she stumbled on the sidewalk and crashed into him with her viola case.
Joey had run away from home and was huddled, hungry and freezing, on a
bench in Central Park when a handsome sailor offered to buy her some
dinner.

Bookending the stories are an introduction and an epilogue in which
Sabar explores research by psychologists and others about the role of
physical space in attraction and love. It turns out there are, indeed,
certain characteristics of public places that facilitate engagement
between strangers, and New York has them in spades. For one thing,
these places draw large numbers of people, so it's inevitable that some
of them will interact. "Contrary to the notion that the best-used parks
and plazas are hideaways from the urban rush," Sabar writes,
summarizing the research of urbanist William Whyte, "people often
sought out the busiest areas of a public space to lunch, chat with
colleagues, or snuggle."

Sabar says many of these places contain a common frame of reference: "a
mime, a juggler, a musician, a street character. A spectacle, even a
minor one, ... takes two strangers with ostensibly nothing in common
and, through a shared, immediate experience, links them, even just for
a moment," he writes. A third factor is adrenaline: people in an
"emotionally stimulating situation" are more likely to reach out to
those around them. "To me," Sabar says, "the introduction really is
what grounds this in something more than light, fun, fluffy stories."

The stories are hardly fluffy. Although each couple eventually
marries, Sabar is too much a realist to leave out the inevitable
strife. Couples struggle, fight, lose touch. "I wanted the stories to
have the texture of real life," he says. "They had these beautiful ways
they met, but then it started to look like any other love affair: ups
and downs, missed connections. These public places set you on the right
path, but afterwards it's up to you to make it stick."

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